End of Daze

Well, today is the 1st workday back on standard time after a light-filled summer. I hate this day every year. It'll be pitch-black by the time I leave the office at 5:15 p.m.

It's also only three weeks until Thanksgiving and seven and a half weeks until Christmas, which means that New Years will be here in two months. (Can you see a theme developing here yet?)

Which makes it PRACTICALLY President's Day which is only a hop, skip and a jump ahead of Memorial Day Weekend.

So let's all thank God that the long, dark, cold winter is practically over, aside from a couple of minutes of minus zero temperatures and several feet of snow and slush, which we'll have to endure first!

Oh, yeah, sure, I bitch about winter. It's not nearly as much fun at 58 as it was when I was oh, say, 12. But you know what? I wouldn't appreciate summer nearly as much as I do, if I didn't have to suffer through winter to get it.

Which brings me to an interesting subject.

The necessity for downs.

I mean, would any of us appreciate how wonderful life truly can be if, at some time or another, perhaps even quite often, it didn't downright suck? A lot!?

Way back in 1998 I hit what we in certain 12-Step programs refer to as "a bottom." No, no, not a "bottom" the way gay men mean "bottom", but rather bottom in the sense of a place so low that it finally dawned on me that it was time to crawl back "up." It was a pretty awful bottom by contemporary standards (way back in 1935 when the grandaddy of all 12-Step programs began, everybody had a hideous "low bottom"). I lost everything, or at least everything I rated as important up until that time. I have, of course, rethought everything since then and what seemed so important in those days doesn't seem at all important now.

But if I hadn't hit that bottom, I couldn't possibly have come to realize just how blessed my life is today. In fact, if I still had my old way of "stinkin' thinkin'" working away inside my pea-brain, I would definitely think that my life today is boring, staid, and definitely way-too-sober.

Yet I'm so happy now because I was so miserable then.

I couldn't possibly have foreseen, then, how much my mind could change about so many things.

But it did.

And from out of that, the most barren winter of my pitiful life, there emerged the most wondrous spring I could've possibly imagined.

Just like what's going to happen in the next couple of months in real life.

And all I have to do is show up for it and wait for the miracle to happen.

Just like I did then.